Cyber, Inc: Business restructuring literature and/as cybertheory

Publication

Publication

Convergence
,
Volume 7
-
Issue 1
p. 40-
60

Facilitated by shared metaphors of cyborgs, cyberspace, and virtuality, recognising its common historical roots in cybernetics, and also concerned with intervening in the technologised social relations of the late twentieth century and into the twenty-first, business restructuring literature can be usefully read as cybertheory. We argue that business restructuring literature rewrites three central problematics of cybertheory: it establishes the virtual organisation, it rewrites employees as cyborgs, and constructs corporate culture as a cybernetic system. Business writers claim to offer the ideal technological and social forms central to the emergence of cyberculture. But they rewrite its central figures in support of a neoliberal governance project, reproducing technological determinism and global capitalist ideology.